


be loud, be bold (oh, the lessons i have learned from you)

by jemmasimmns (laurellance)



Series: jemma simmons cronicles [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Jemma Simmons Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7278511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurellance/pseuds/jemmasimmns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SHIELD unofficially disbands, and Jemma’s almost glad when she leaves the base. It’s a bittersweet goodbye, and she focuses on the base even as she loses sight- the memories choke her, but they were <i>hers</i> until the end.  </p><p>But this was the question- how do you miss ghosts and yet honour their memory at the same time? (Loving is hard, loving is painful, but perhaps she is still doomed to be haunted for all eternity.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to add- this isn't very fitzsimmons friendly per se. (I'm not a very big fan of fitz, and jemma deserves so much better.)
> 
> so just a heads up if you really stan fs or what not, whatever at this point.

Sometimes she wonders whether dating Fitz was a good idea- it wasn’t like she really thought of him in that aspect, but it was easy- perhaps a lazy trick of sorts, but it worked and it fills her with a temporary bliss that feels nice. 

There’s no heartbreak, not really. But it feels off, forced. (There’s something missing- in the way she’s off balanced, only she doesn’t know how to rectify it, so she stays with Fitz to fill the void inside her.)

* * *

 

It takes her a long time to acknowledge that the void inside her hurts. Because it’s no longer just Trip anymore, beautiful Trip who had told her inside stories of the Howling Commandos, who had given her exclusive photographs of the Commandos and Peggy together, who had given her a locket that had once belonged to _Peggy Carter_ herself. She misses him, with a passion that she had never write felt before- he stays on her, the first tattoo she bears. 

She thinks, that of all the injuries she has experienced, this one aches the most. She still remembers the _pieces_ of his body, how all that was left was sheer fragments of stone, and it breaks her. She remembers sobbing to her hearts content in the lab working late, trying to recall the teasing-adoration tone he’d use when talking to her, but only remembering how tiny and fragile the pieces of what remained of his body were, and she ends up crawling in a ball under her desk, because she just wanted the hurt to **_go away_**. 

She wears his memory with pride now- and as the base moves further away from sight, she finds herself finally able to make peace with his death. (But her heart still aches for what could have been, for what she could have had if he had just _listened_ \- and it still hurts, every single day.)

* * *

 

The flight she had taken was a private one. She had pleaded to one more day _(‘to properly say goodbye’)_ than the others, and they had obliged, willingly so. Fitz had asked, to get a non-answer, something along the lines of nostalgia, thus so she walks the base at night, just one more time. 

They’re relocating- she doesn’t blame them, assessing the damage Daisy had done, the way there were small dents and cracks along the walls of mishaps along the way, the alcoholic smell that came from the tables, but it’s the memories that lead her. 

There’s her and Daisy, when Daisy still had trouble managing her powers, there’s her and Trip flirting, there’s Hunter and Mack playing video games on the couch and she feels like the tenth doctor in that moment- _she didn’t want to go_. Not now, not ever. (She knows she should aspire to have the parting the ninth doctor did, in how he willingly gave himself up- she smiles at the memory, because for once she understands where he comes from.)

Coulson steps down; something about too many failures acting as the head of SHIELD. May takes his place, and Jemma’s not even entirely sure she processes that until they’re gone. 

It’s the pod that causes her to break down first. Because she is letting herself be guided by memories, and if it was unscientific, then hell be damned- science could wait, science had never grieved, never experienced heartbreak. It wasn’t human- just a area of learning, and she could put it off for herself, for just one day where she wasn’t hindered by anything. 

Jemma’s heart doesn’t break as bad as it had the first time, but it still hurts. It’s the months worth of asking herself whether Will was dead, whether he would still love her, of the nights she would cry herself to sleep because she had finally found home, only to have destroyed under her feet when she had finally accepted it. 

Fitz is apologetic, as he is awkwardly unable to console her grief- how could he? How could he just call Will a _boyfriend_ , when he turned out to be the one person who she had for months, the only solace and comfort she had stuck on a alien planet with no hope of going home? How could he understand the feeling of being unrooted, and finally finding another home only to have it ripped away yet again, live in precarious hope and denial, only to find that her worst dream was true. 

Her Professor Flyboy had died for her- she can still remember the smile he’d only give her, the slight one that expressed so much in little words. The way he would rely on physical contact, how he would affectionately brush her hair, how he would admire her like his sun. 

She misses that- she misses _him_. She misses the slight ways he would show his affection, the way he would always hold her as they slept.

She lives, when he had not. (And sometimes, just sometimes- she thinks that if _It_ had not shown up, they both could have lived and that’s yet another one of the ways that they could have _lived_.)

* * *

 

There are five bottles of whiskey in the fridge left, and three bottles of beer. Mack had taken some of the beer right after, and she imagines Mack had been trying to channel Hunter in that particular moment. Drink away all sorrows, but she knows that it never worked. It only makes it duller while the alcohol affects them, but the memories come back in higher clarity the day after. 

She doesn’t touch the bottles, not really. She takes a bottle of the beer, and drinks it, to honour Hunter’s memory. (She swears she sees his ghost in front of the couch, playing video games with Mack and yelling as he lost, spectacularly.)

* * *

 

She looks to the door of the lab and almost swears she sees Bobbi leaning by it, giving that causal grin, the one that made the sun look dull, the one that makes Jemma happy that to her knowledge, Bobbi is alive. (She can’t remember Trip’s smile anymore- not without seeing the fragments that had remained of his body, but when she looks at the photographs, and she has _many_ , his smile is as bright and radiant as any white star.)

She leans by the door, similar to how Bobbi would, and just closes her eyes and _remembers_. The times Bobbi made her watch all of the Star Wars movies, and how she in return made Bobbi watch Doctor Who, The Great British Bakeoff, and the debates they’d had over which was better.

She remembers the times where’d she monitor Bobbi, or work with her in the lab when Fitz had another one of his days where he would get irrationally irritated because she had mentioned a male in a romantic sense. Bobbi would glare at him, guar at him until he slunk off to Hunter’s smelly messy couch, and they would make bets over who was worse at playing Zelda- Fitz, who generally didn’t know or care for it, calling it ‘childish, and for _losers_ ’, or Hunter, who continued to lose at the easiest levels to Mack every single time. 

Bobbi had once brushed her hair back behind her ear- but it’s the look she remembers. A tender one, one that she knew was sincere. Because she had known Bobbi, and the look was unguarded, honest. The look was soft, in the sense that it could have been love- something not entirely platonic, because Jemma knows that kind of look. It’s the kind she gives to the people she really cared about- one of passion, dedication, of all things good and pure. 

She thinks that kissing Bobbi would have been nice now, because at least Bobbi would have a answer to her problems, or at least a kind of solution. Bobbi always had made things better for her.

* * *

 

By the time she gets a area she knows as _Daisy_ , she knows that she misses her. Because the destruction, she knows it was because she had been trying to kill _It_. She smiles at the damage, at the holes in the wall, at the knocked down barrows, at it all- it’s beautiful, she thinks. 

She looks back on their day at The Hub, at what she had called _Bad Girl Shenanigans_ at the time. There’s a beauty in that time, there’s a beauty in her innocence. It’s surreal now, to think back at old memories, at how everything had changed, but today she let’s herself. 

She can’t forget GH-325, all the things they had been through, how Daisy had changed so much during her stay on Maveth, the hug she had given her after her freefall, the bullet- and maybe, she doesn’t want to, because those experiences she values now- and perhaps it’s too late, but she wants to tell Daisy that the guilt gets easier to deal with when you accept it, that it doesn’t choke you as much then, and that one day she would find love again. 

(With her, maybe, if Daisy was so willingly. She smiles at the thought, and it’s the closest thing she has to saying goodbye to the memories.)

* * *

 

When she arrives at Perthshire, Fitz is waiting by the cottage they’d rented with his money. 

(A piece of her heart breaks right then and there, and she doesn't know how to fix it.)


	2. bravery comes in many forms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> or, how the princess rediscovered herself in the process of saving herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dedicated to elda (@blacxsiren on tumblr) for being one of the best people i've ever met, and for her hitting 3k followerss. 
> 
> not fitzsimmons or fitz friendly lmao.

or, how the princess rediscovered herself in the process of saving herself.

* * *

 

Perthshire feels wrong in ways Jemma could never explain. It was something off balance- akin to how the chemical formula for water was always taught _wrong_. But this wasn’t simply a case of not being able to balance an equation, it was something else- the gaping hole in her heart, perhaps? The one that burned her from inside out, the one that threatened to tear her apart internally if it got worse. 

Maybe this was a consequence of choosing something easy for a change- she had just _given up_ , and here she was, clearly unhappy.

(Then again, she’s not the same sixteen year old girl who wanted to change and explore the world, who had a million questions and a clear sense of morality, and no guilt nor blood on her hands whatsoever.

then again the person she was a decade ago is someone she looks into the mirror and wants to see- the strength, the optimism, the innocence, the kindness that had been so obvious now gone.)

* * *

 

Fitz talks about the most inane of things and she resists rolling her eyes at some comment Fitz makes- something about buying a monkey, and Jemma wants to tell him that those kind of things never mattered, that they were _never_ significant. 

Instead, she holds her tongue and lets her mind wander. It’s something she’s done often since leaving SHIELD, but now the memories are her only solace. 

(Trip’s smile is as bright as the sun, and Will looks like her as if she is his universe. Daisy is still there, smiling and happy, and Bobbi is always by her, always there.)

* * *

 

One night, she leaves their shared bed. Fitz had been snoring, his body half covering hers, and it just didn’t feel right- because Fitz had always been a friend to her, nothing more. 

She stands by the cottage door. It’s dark outside, and the wind bites against her bare legs. The worn old thing she calls her nightgown (A shirt that Trip had gave her one day, technically. In reality, she had hoarded all his clothes after his death (minus the underwear) and stuffed them under her bed.) holds somewhat firm against the weather, and she thinks bitterly, that she might as well deserve this. 

She waits for Dawn to arrive, to see the _single_ sun rise from the darkness of the sky, because she still can’t sleep properly after Maveth, and probably never will. Darkness scares her now, because she knows how sometimes it can last forever, without pause nor end, and it sends shivers all over her body just thinking about it. 

The sun rises, and she lets go of a breath that she hadn’t realised she had held.

* * *

 

Perthshire ends because Fitz has found a barely legal job working under Radcliffe and the burning hole in her chest reduces in size. 

(She turns down Radcliffe’s offer- because she wants to be alone, for just once.)

* * *

 

The minute after Fitz leaves for his flight back to the states, she goes to the closest store to buy the strongest liquor they have. 

(There are a million reasons why she shouldn’t do something so _Hunter_ -esque, but damn the rules, because if she’s going to make the rest of her vacation enjoyable she might as well get so drunk that her memory would fail her.)

* * *

 

She finds out a few things about herself in that bout of loss of all reason and logic, the conclusions being:

 

        * Antoine Triplett’s death date comes up in a couple of weeks and she is not ready to handle it.
        * She had snapped at Fitz over Skype, and she cannot say how good that had felt (She blames the awful hangover)
        * Her shrine to Will Daniels is disturbingly sad and tragic and would be a good ‘anonymous’ donation to his mother.
        * She intends to bring the remains of Trip to his family- maybe, _just maybe_ , it would give them the kind of satisfactory that SHIELD death notices never had. Because she knows that feeling death, is so much harder compared to reading the file of a fallen agent that you never really knew to begin with.
        * She doesn’t love Fitz the way he wants her to love him- the sex the first time had been something that she only really recalls as a lack of judgement, that agreeing to be romantically involved with him is a big mistake.
        * She misses Bobbi, and she misses Daisy, and she misses the times where she actually knew herself as a human being with a personality, and not a robot with a brain and a functioning body. 



 

She understands for once, why some people took a certain reliance to alcohol to cope with themselves- it’s a self destructive move, the kind that was done when the person was so out of options that they didn’t quite care anymore- just as long as they could have just a little peace to themselves, even if it was a sweet and short temporary bliss.

She pours whatever that had remained out into the grass, a promise to herself that she would be better. 

(She lights a match to the spilled alcohol later, and admires the beauty of the flames. It’s a dangerous one, a unruly one, just like the hole in her chest that doesn’t show up when she looks into the mirror, the one that threatens to burn her alive, and somehow she can live with herself better because of this.)

* * *

 

Finding the storage facility that houses Trip’s remains is easy- she’s a particularly memorable figure to the people that ran that facility, and she thinks that they remember her well. Given that she had been _very_ specific with how to handle them, and how she had just looked at the remains as if they meant something. (They had- his name was Antoine Triplett, one of the kindest, most generous men she had ever encountered.)

It turns out they had moved his remains to a more private and more secure location. There’s no identification or talk, just a person leading her down a hall to a room that is monitored 24/7, with a automatic locking door and required identification. 

They had not changed- all the chips and pieces remained there, and Jemma smiles at them with a softness and vulnerability that the security guard monitoring the screen just _knows_ is one of ex-lovers. The soulmate kind that had meant the world to them, and the guard says nothing about this because he’s seen it so many times, so many retellings, and he knows better than to comment on it.

* * *

 

All that could be said about Jemma Simmons and the remains of Antoine Triplett was that it was the first time anyone had seen Jemma smile that way- the nostalgic almost there smile, the one that indicated she had truly and properly loved them, that she still felt them so familiar that she would show her vulnerability for it. 

She watches over the suitcase in the cross-country drive all the way to the location of his mother. She smells terrible, looks terrible, feels terrible, but the suitcase always remains, always stays, and it’s a small blessing for her. 

She can protect him, for just this once. (She lets a tear slip onto the suitcase, because Trip was never _hers_ , not as much as he was his family’s. And this, this was for his family.)

* * *

She knocks on the door, once, twice, three times. She knows there’s a door bell, but it feels nice to physically feel the door, feel something that was _real_ and _there_ and she considers leaves when the door opens.

An old man opens the door. His dark brown skin is a stark contrast to the silvery white of his hair, and his eyes are misty. From tears, or catalysts, Jemma does not know. All that she does know is that she cannot back out of this now. 

The old man eyes the suitcase with somewhat clouded eyes. “Sir, perhaps now isn’t the best time, but, these are the remains of-” She chokes up, just the tiniest bit, and doesn’t finish the sentence.

The old man takes the suitcase from her hands and grimaces just a little bit. “Come in.”

* * *

 

The old man leads Jemma to what she assumes was Trip’sroom. The room is covered with picture frames, covered with posters of SHIELD logos, and other things she can’t quite see. (She does spot on the wall, what appeared to be a hashtag covered up by a picture frame. _#BlackLivesMatter_ perhaps? Trip had always been very passionate about it, that much she had surmised from the times she had spied on him watching the news in private.)

The old man sets the suitcase on the bed. He doesn’t open it, doesn’t really need to, because they both know that the dead only occasionally stay dead and Antoine Triplett will always stay dead, regardless. It’s not fair, but that’s something neither really wanted to talk about, not really. 

The old man gets up, and grabs a box from the desk just opposite the foot of the bed. “The day before he passed away, he had called us. The usual call, nothing that note worthy-” There’s a look of regret in his eye, in the things he hadn’t had asked, and Jemma knows the look, because the dead never truly die, not if they were remembered- 

He continues.“-until he asked me how to know if it was love.” 

It’s in a lower voice that he admits: “Ms. Simmons, you are one of the only women he has ever talked about unprompted. The first time he had mentioned you, he-” The old man stops, and it’s a sort of understanding as she knows what had happened. She nods, and he looks at the suitcase with tears, and maybe today had felt more like remembrance than goodbye. 

“My friend Daisy, she had been shot. I was struggling to save her life, until the other members of the team I was in brought back this.. miracle substance. GH-325.” It’s not even half of the story, but she remembers him, the conversation they’d had outside Daisy’s pod. She _misses_ him, misses him in a bone deep sense, because in the end he was her responsibility and she had failed him in the end. 

The old man nods, and it’s a quiet thing, because he looks at the suitcase with unreserved tenderness that she knows isn’t for her. None of this had been, from the start of this visit. “After SHIELD fell, Coulson told me that he was my responsibility.”

“He trusted you, always did, Ms. Simmons. He called you a honorable woman, compared you to Peg even.” 

“I wasn’t able to stop him from going back- he had gone back to rescue one of our team members, and there, he went to rest.” The unspoken sentiment of this is what remains of him is left unsaid, as they both focus their attention on varying things around the room. 

He pushes the box into Jemma’s hand. “Trip mentioned that he had wanted to give it to you, on that last call. Said that you admired Peg, thought Peg’s necklace of Steve might be a nice gift to get you to go out with him.”

“He loved you, Ms. Simmons.”

(Jemma thinks at this point that she lets herself grieve, because all she remembers is tears and regrets and Gabriel Jones holding her while crying over his lost grandson, and there’s memories shared over shaking voices, runny noses, and she _misses_ him, so many times over.)

* * *

 

She takes with her when she leaves a few old photos, Peggy carter’s necklace, and the whispers of admissions of a grieving Howling Commando that tells her the oddest stories. The most insignificant ones, the important ones, the ones that were so mundane at first glance, but she also gives away part go her memories in the process.

There’s the ghost of a man who had told her stories of his childhood, of how he would play with their ancient tech, who she had vouched and fought along side. (She still has the knife he gave her, and she pulls it out of her pocket as she drives back.)

It’s not quite goodbye, not quite anything, but it’s something that she can hold onto.

* * *

 

She mails Will’s mother a box. There is no return address, not really, but in it are pictures, Facebook posts, and a motley collection of things she had gathered over time. 

She knows it’s not closure, because closure would mean that Fitz had destroyed Will’s body and telling her that, but it’s the closest thing to closure and that is that.

* * *

 

She looks herself in the mirror one day, and realises the shame that usually resided there isn’t quite there anymore. 

(Fitz nags at her conscience, and she knows she can be brave.)

* * *

 

_He loved you, Ms. Simmons._

It haunts her dreams, the admission.

(She waits for the sun to rise, day after day, because she can’t forget people no matter how much easier it would have been. But Dawn always comes, and maybe, it feels like she can start anew with herself, despite being in her late twenties now, with memories that threaten to destroy her from within.)

* * *

 

Six months after, Fitz tries to propose to her. 

She tells him that she is sorry, and that she doesn’t accept. (Walking away had never felt so nice.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @antoine-triplett!!!

**Author's Note:**

> find me @jemma-daisy!!!


End file.
